Columnist
His high school graduation is any day now, which means my 18-year-old son is busy tying up loose ends. His tasks will sound all-too-familiar to anyone who’s had a 12th-grader under his roof. They include arranging to get the cap-and-gown he should have secured months ago, paying overdue book fines, and grunting at parental reminders that the school year isn’t over until diploma is firmly in hand.
He handles the season’s hectic to-and-fro with the energy of a typical teen. His fleet gallops through the house often transform him into a blur of braces, a flash of sneakers. Once in a while he emerges from this dizzying whirl to provide us with a pleasant surprise.
Near semester’s end, we received an invitation to an academic awards ceremony at his school, a most unexpected event for parents of an indifferent student. It is an occasion for pride and the chance to perform the increasingly unnecessary tasks that represent the fragile strands of our diminishing influence.
My wife is particularly useful here, helping him shop for an outfit, pressing his pants. As for myself, most days it seems as if I can’t do much for him anymore, besides knotting the necktie he wears to the ceremony.
Just before it’s time to leave, he arrives with another surprise: His hair is neatly trimmed, and in the hue he was born with. A mundane occurrence in some families I’m sure, but I’m talking about a young fellow who has spent much of the past year experimenting with hair colors ranging from magenta to sunburst orange.
At school, he traverses the stage in much the same way that he negotiates that tricky terrain between adolescence and maturity, all arms, legs and studied nonchalance. Watching him, my thoughts wander to Richard Wright, and most particularly, his heartbreaking short story, “The Man Who Was Almost A Man.”
Dave Saunders, the hapless young protagonist of Wright’s story, is 17 and gaining a newfound appreciation of his growing strength and wondering at the grace and potential of his “long loose-jointed limbs.”
Yearning for room to stretch out and assert himself, he acquires a gun. As is often the case, Dave’s impulsive purchase leads to tragedy. The story’s conclusion finds Dave fleeing his rural homestead under cover of darkness, aboard a freight train and heading n he hopes n “away, away to somewhere, somewhere he could be a man.”
Few writers have equaled Wright in portraying the complications surrounding one’s existence as a young black man in America. He seemed to possess a special gift for describing the frustration that results from feeling as Dave Saunders did: confident and uncertain at the same time, feeling ready for flight yet grounded by restrictions both real and imagined.
Knowing that the riddles of adolescence could not be negotiated without assistance, Wright took note of the valuable influence of folklore, of “the channels through which the racial wisdom flowed.” In “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” he passionately addressed the powerful process of “blues, spirituals, and folk tales recounted from mouth to mouth; the whispered words of a black mother to her black daughter on the ways of men, (the) confidential wisdom of a black father to his black son.”
He knew that the traditional black community, enriched by a thriving population of elders, artists, philosophers and preachers, offered as much education as any school.
But Wright published his blueprint in 1937, and not even his prophetic powers could have foreseen the advances and setbacks to come. All manner of unforeseen developments, including drugs, desegregation and the distractions of the gigantic entertainment industry, have combined to challenge the traditional “channels” of wisdom that Wright celebrated. Fathers bent on spreading such insights may have to yell to be heard over the roaring din of PlayStations, cell phones and iPods.
My high school days seem like a carefree romp compared to what my son’s generation wrestles with. The most I had to worry about was the occasional bully or gym teacher from hell.
Hell? There was no crack, no AIDS, no post-Columbine bomb threats or post-9/11 terror alerts. I’ve done my best to prepare him for the world, but it is a place far different than the one I knew.
I suppose I could tell the kid he should start knotting his own ties. But, then, what opportunity would I have to be close to him, to savor these days of growth and wondrous transformation? I’m determined to cling to these rapidly fading moments when he is no longer a boy, and almost a man.
A former reporter for the American, Jabari Asim is a columnist for the Washington Post. His e-mail address is asimj@washpost.com.